Rumper

Braehead Clan have completed the signing of Canadian netminder Joel Rumper for the upcoming season.

The top wage-earning tier of the slaughtering crew studied by Commons in 1904 comprised eleven "50-cent men" (flayers and splitters), two and one-half "45-cent men" (back flayers), and two and one-half "40-cent men" (rumper flayers).

His wife, Marta, will also appear in the production as Lady Rumpers, and RMT medical specialist partner Mike Gilbert plays the suicidal Mr Purdue.

I particularly enjoyed performances from Joanna McCallum as Lady Rumpers, a recently returned colonial (a character perhaps more precisely drawn from the period than the others), and Teddy Kempner as BMA president Sir Percy Shorter, whose bristling beard suggests yet another reference, to James Robertson Justice in the Doctor film comedies.

His fondness for 'clubbing it' in 'beastly and atheistical company' scandalised Oliver Cromwell and other godly rumpers. They would have been more shocked still to discover that some of Chaloner's beer money came from the Spanish ambassador, who rewarded Spain's friends at Westminster by having his agents entertain them 'in gardens and taverns, as is the custom here'.

Just the names of the jobs is chilling: Stockhandlers, knockers, shacklers, stickers, beheaders, hide removers, skinners, leg-breakers, foot-skinners, backers, rumpers, hide-droppers, butchers, gut-snatchers, gutters, splitters, and luggers.

They worked as cattle-"splitters," "floormen," "rumpers," and in numerous other difficult, delicate, and exhausting knife jobs vital to the packers' feverish pursuit of "uninterrupted production."

You may wonder why the Labour Rumpers were revolting?

Such Whiggish teleology has served to distract attention from the sheer verve and imagination with which the Rumpers ruled the English Commonwealth.